The Open Source Philosophy

Philosophy

Who we are

Right now the OpenEMM development and support team is quite small and consists of fulltime developers and freelancers who work for the company AGNITAS AG, because the core code of OpenEMM was developed by AGNITAS during the last 10 years. (AGNITAS is a German company founded in 1999 solely for the purpose of developing software and providing services for e-marketing.)

But we hope to expand the sphere of the OpenEMM development and support team. We want to motivate developers to improve OpenEMM and share their code with all other users of OpenEMM, and we want to motivate users to share their knowhow with the OpenEMM community via support documents and entries in our support forums.

Why did we go open source with our software?

We firmly believe (and already have experienced) that open source is a new and superior model for developing standard software. No internal development team (not even that of Microsoft) is able to compete with a community of motivated developers spread all over the world. And since the source code is openly available for review and security audits, its quality is often much better than “hidden” source code of closed source software.

We ourselves use open source software as the foundation for our products. In summer 2006 we felt that the quality of our products was good enough to go open source with the standard version of our core software.

By the way, we see open source business software which is backed by a commercial company advantageous because it makes it easier for enterprises to adopt open source software. Enterprises often demand security, contracts, guarantees and service level agreements. We (AGNITAS) can provide it. We think that a company in the back is an added value for OpenEMM in case someone needs commercial support.

If you are interested in commercial services like setup, e-mail support, hosting and development, please have a look at the list of commercial services for OpenEMM we offer.

The only request we have:Do not use OpenEMM for spamming!

OpenEMM was not developed for sending out huge e-mail blasts and for spamming, but for opt-in based sophisticated, targeted and tailored e-mail marketing campaigns. Of course, you can send out mass mailings with OpenEMM – but please only to e-mail addresses where you have the permission to do so!

Open letter to all OpenEMM users

Dear OpenEMM user,

the number of OpenEMM users is growing from week to week and we highly appreciate the time and effort you have invested in choosing OpenEMM for your e-mail marketing and/or transaction e-mails!

OpenEMM is an open source product which implies that it is available for free. But free does not only mean that you do not have to pay to use OpenEMM, is also means that you have the freedom to modify and improve OpenEMM on your own.

We value your input regarding bugs and new features and the effort this means for you. But while we are committed to fix all known bugs and problems which are not too distribution-specific and while we plan to add features with every new release (see our public roadmap), please be aware that we are not obliged to do so, let alone in a certain time frame.

All current contributors to OpenEMM are not financially independent, but have to work and make some money for a living. Therefore, paid development assignments always have a higher priority for us. In fact, they guarantee you that we have a chance to work on OpenEMM, too.

Therefore, if you want to support us by contributing code to OpenEMM, you are very welcome (more). We promise you to integrate all bug fixes and every new feature of broader interest into the OpenEMM mainline so that all other OpenEMM users can benefit from your work as well.

On the other hand, if you do not want to provide code but you are in a hurry and you need a certain bug fix or a new feature right away, you can mandate us and we will fix your problem for a fixed fee within a given time frame (see our commercial services).